The young Karl B?was likewise manipulated: B?s son, the actor Karlheinz B? recounts in another interview that his father was warned that if he left, every member of his family would be sent to a concentration camp.Richard Strauss himself accepted the post of president of the Reich Music Institute. Palmer interviews Strauss’s great-granddaughter Madeleine Rohla-Strauss, who offers a near-apology for her forebear’s action. He was then told that, the Nazis having arrived in Austria, Goebbels was threatening to disband the Vienna Philharmonic and send all its members into the army. Goebbels wanted to establish the supremacy of the Berlin orchestra over Vienna; but Berlin was in Prussia, the fiefdom of Goering, whom he hated. Furthermore, in Goebbels’ view, Vienna was infested with Jews; Mahler, the great inspiration to the Vienna Philharmonic, was Jewish, as was that other great conductor, Bruno Walter, who had fled. When Furtw?ler heard that the Vienna Philharmonic was in effect to be abolished, according to Elisabeth he went to the F?r and said, ‘If you do that, I am definitely leaving.’ He’d been thinking about it, but hadn’t said it until then. And the F?r said, ‘No, you can’t possibly do that.’ So he stayed and thus he saved the Vienna Philharmonic.

Mrs Furtw?ler says that after the war he finally recognised everything that had happened, and said to her, ‘Germans did this! Happiness is no longer possible in our life.’ That’s incredibly moving.”Furtw?ler was not the only conductor caught in the Nazi stranglehold. Controversy was especially rife over why Furtw?ler did not leave. Palmer interviewed Furtw?ler’s nonagenarian widow Elisabeth, who reveals how her husband was coerced into staying in Germany.”By 1938, Furtw?ler had had enough and he let the Berlin Philharmonic know that he intended to leave,” Palmer explains “This got back to the authorities. Fortunately those plans came to nothing, although Palmer has unearthed for the first time the actual architectural drawings.

Still, the effects of the power vice in which the Nazis soon held the festival were far-reaching, for the musicians responded to them in ways that affected their reputations for the rest of their lives and have continued to dog them after death.Toscanini, among others, refused to perform under the regime But for some, that was not the case. Within a week of the Anschluss, there was a plebiscite and 97 per cent of the population voted in favour. I interviewed many eye-witnesses of the time, including Maria von Trapp of Sound of Music fame.”The invaders had big plans for Salzburg. They intended to build a monstrous new festival theatre on the hillside across the river – “the brief was that it must be higher than the castle,” says Palmer – and a parallel building on the opposite hill as the Wehrmacht headquarters for “Ostmark”, as the Nazis * * euphemistically called Austria. But calamity was not far away.”Even English history books talk of the Nazis ‘invading’ Austria,” Palmer says “Actually, they were welcomed. Musically, it attracted the finest performers of the day, notably the Vienna Philharmonic and conductors such as Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtw?ler and Strauss himself conducting his own operas. It’s a work of genius, and it’s no accident that it’s still there.”The festival quickly became a magnet to the intellectual elite of Europe, besides the high society that still frequents it.